“Once as I looked up I saw a big, pure drop of rain slip from leaf to leaf of a clematis vine. The thought occurred to me that it was just such quick, unexpected, commonplace, specific things that poets and other observers jot down in their note-books.”

“All the way down through the moonlight beside the river I was literally attacked by so many poems that I felt like a juggler, terrified that I couldn’t keep them all going long enough at least to jot down a note. When I arrived, I made a dash for the typewriter, coat still on and typed like automatic writing for half an hour.”

“Poetry (at any rate in my case) is like trying to remember a tune you’ve forgotten. All corrections are attempts to get nearer to the forgotten tune. A poem is written because the poet gets a sudden vision—lasting one second or less—and he attempts to express the whole of which the vision is a part.”

“I did a lot of fishing when I was a little younger—surfcasting—and it’s like when you get a strike. Something heavy and alive is on the end of the line and you don’t know what it is but you can feel the power of it and you have to pull it in. When you feel you’ve got a line that’s pulling a lot of emotional freight with it, then you know you’ve probably started a poem.”

“A lot of metaphor must be in the beholder’s eye. My kind of mind is so used to ‘seeing double’ that it finds unwelcome subtexts in an instruction manual…A psychiatrist friend calls the creative temperament Janusian—after Janus, whose nature is to look both ways. I thought everybody was like that but he said no, that for him, the implications of phrases like a ‘dark white’ or a ‘burning cold’—which are mother’s milk to me—left him feeling, you know, seasick…”

“Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called ‘pedestrian poetry.'”

“Word by word a poem is built. The choice of one over another implies an attitude and reflects the writer’s beliefs, insights, and character. Think of forestry bosses calling the killing of trees ‘harvesting,’ or of Dick Cheney calling water boarding ‘robust interrogation.’ Albert Camus went so far as to say, ‘Naming an object inaccurately means adding to the unhappiness of the world.'”